Just had a gander at the question which has caused all the fuss, and is it just me, or is it quite doable ? True I know **** all about "peasant economies" or "1-person-cities", and I am making an educated guess at "output" and "co-ordination costs", but overall it seems a straightforward mathematical proposition - certainly not out of place in a degree.
Or am I missing something ?
In message , Jethro_uk writes
It doesn't seem a case of whether or not it is out of place in a degree per se.
The argument from some of the student seems to be that some of the questions (including the one quoted) had not been covered by the course and that the mathematical content had not been covered.
The university don't agree.
From the outside it's hard to make any kind of useful judgement on who is correct though
It is a BSc so a basic knowledge of mathematics may have been assumed.
Well, I teach economics* on Geography courses at university, and IME:
Whether it's covered - simply don't know. The tricky parts are things like 'coordination costs'. But that's not difficult, it's just the terminology - to emphasise that societies are 'cheaper' with things like modern telecommunications and transport.
On maths, I don't see the need to do a single calculation, much less 'calculate this, differentiate that'. It is not maths-based, it expects the students to understand the relationship between variables.
Didn't seem too onerous maths - certainly my A level would have prepared me for it.
I don't and never have studied economics, but I didn't feel the question looked like it was "written in Chinese".
I don't see the need for any maths calculation in that question - simply understanding what ^0.5, >1 mean etc. It even says 'provide intuition'. I suppose a student could have gone to town with hypothetical numbers, or even real data, but I doubt it.
I think it was written to stretch the more able and engaged students - it doesn't need much more than literacy. It's highly unlikely that the question was mandatory - students usually choose from a list (3 from 8 type thing).
An expectation by some modern degree students that everything should be handed to them on a plate?
Perhaps they think that economics consists of sitting around yacking. After all, assuming they even bother to watch the news, what they see is the likes of Stephanie Flanders, Evan Davies, and Robert Peston apparently doing just that.
(well *we* know, and the named individuals above know, that there's more to it than that)
Some of the students taking the paper were doing a BA (politics I think it said).
No, but not all the students may have done A level maths. And that question was only one example , others were complained about.
No. But my point was that from the outside, it's hard to judge who is most correct since we don't know the course entry requirements, and the course contents.
And c*ck ups do happen, I remember at from my Uni days that an exam (from another dept) did have some questions that weren't in the course (change of course content I think, somehow old and new stuff got in there). It was an end of year exam or something, not directly contributing to the degree, and something got sorted out.
I must admit that that was my initial response.
During one of my Finals, hands started to go up from the Physics students (they mixed subjects up to help try and prevent cheating) and I subsequently found out that due to an error one of the questions on their paper really couldn't be answered. If they had shown the correct direction in their workings, they got full marks for the question.
I enjoyed Tim Harford's Undercover Economist but found myself asking whether he'd told me anything I didn't already know.
It doesn't look like its a difficult problem. Maybe if you haven't done any maths it would be a problem. Anyone that's done enough maths to do a physics degree wouldn't have a problem.
I suppose that in the days of answering multiple choice questions and expecting the question to have actually been covered in class it may be a problem for some.
RJH posted
The phrase "coordination costs" probably means the opposite - that the more people you have in a city, the more you get inefficiencies through congestion, pollution, crime etc.
Well that's maths based. But simple maths.
To reach a reasonable solution of the problem ISTM you have to do the following:
The only tricky part of the question is the last sentence, the answer to which lies in descriptions of agricultural and industrial revolutions, natural resource exploitation, technological progress, the development of democracy, mass education, international trade, population explosions, migration and the limits to growth. You could write a book on it, and many people have.
Or O-level if you took O-level Maths at 15 and then O-level Additional Maths at 16. At least on the Oxford Board.
In message , Chris French writes
Oh well you don't expect politicians even student ones to know anything technical let alone mathematical do you?
with the O&C, I took both at 15 (just - birthday in May).
That was what degree courses were about; not how much you could remember of your lectures, but how much understanding you showed of the subject.
Co-ordination costs are a sub-set of transaction costs. They relate to the cost of co-ordinating the various parts of an economic exchange; making sure that goods you want are on the market and negotiating a deal to buy them, for example. If you have to walk around the city to find every supplier to get quotations, the co-ordination costs are going be a lot higher than if you can look them up on the internet and bulk email them all.
when 70% get 2-1s, it seems that it is
(On my degree course the figure was 10%)
tim
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